The 'Cannonball Run' Cast: Totally Awesome, Or Godawful?

By | February 25, 2019

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Three for the road: Dean Martin, Roger Moore, and Burt Reynolds in 'The Cannonball Run' (1981). Source: IMDB

The 1981 film The Cannonball Run's cast list featured Burt Reynolds, Farrah Fawcett, Roger Moore, Jamie Farr, Peter Fonda, Terry Bradshaw, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Dom DeLuise. To put that another way: Bandit (from Smokey & The Bandit), a Charlie's Angel, James Bond, Klinger from M*A*S*H, Captain America from Easy Rider, a two-time Super Bowl MVP, 2/5 of the Rat Pack, and, well, Dom DeLuise. Throw in a young Jackie Chan, a young Adrienne Barbeau, country star Mel Tillis, Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder, Valerie Perrine, Bianca Jagger, and crusty Jack Elam and you've got the Cannonball Run cast list just about filled out. In the director's chair, you had Hal Needham, a former stuntman who really liked making movies where fast cars fly through the air.

What a smorgasbord of celebrity. What a rogues' gallery. What a dog's breakfast of Hollywood egos. With a cast list like that, the risk of disaster was high. Too many personalities, too much zaniness, too much partying. Could they follow a script? Wait, was there a script?

Yes, there was a script.

It's important to realize is that, at the time of The Cannonball Run, Burt Reynolds and Farrah Fawcett were at the height of their powers. Burt was just about the coolest dude in Hollywood, a handsome leading man with a devilish charm and a virile mustache, a bankable star of comedies and dramas, while Farrah Fawcett was the '70s swimsuit poster girl with hair that was the envy of every woman in America. Even if Terry Bradshaw couldn't act, Dean Martin and Sammy weren't going to take this seriously, Peter Fonda was going to be weird, Roger Moore might not be funny to Americans, Dom DeLuise would ruin takes just to make Burt laugh -- none of that turned out to be a problem. The Cannonball Run was an incredibly fun movie in 1981, and it holds up today.

Well, maybe that needs to be qualified: The Cannonball Run was incredibly fun then and holds up today assuming you like movies like The Cannonball Run. It's stating the obvious, but it's helpful to note that The Cannonball Run never had a chance with critics.

Critics Hated Cannonball Run; Audiences Didn't Care

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Left: Theatrical poster of 'The Cannonball Run' by Drew Struzan, 1981. Right: Dom DeLuise as Captain Chaos. Source: IMDB

Roger Ebert attacked the cast: "It's like a cattle call. It's like an Actor's Guild picket line. It's like Hollywood Squares on Wheels. Some of the actors are talented, some are not, but they look equally awful in this movie. ... This isn't a cast, it's the answer to a double acrostic." Ebert gave it one-half star out of four, arguing that "it's possible to bring some sense of style and humor even to grade-zilch material [but] this movie doesn't even seem to be trying."

"It's rather like trying to keep track of a turtle race in which all of the contestants have been wildly souped-up and each persists in speeding off in a different direction," wrote the esteemed critic Vincent Canby in The New York Times. "Don't bother to see it unless you're already hooked on the genre."

Gene Siskel called The Cannonball Run "truly stupid," and Gary Arnold of the Washington Post said it was "an aggressive shambles, the latest exercise in amateurism from facetious professionals."

All very clever put-downs, but audiences weren't discouraged. Worldwide, The Cannonball Run grossed over $100 million, a good return on a film that cost less than $20 million to make. It was the sixth-biggest movie of 1981.